On Saturday, besides lunch in his cousin’s home in Portocomaro, he also stopped at a church and visited a nursing home and residence for the elderly.
The pope stayed overnight in the town of Asti, where he celebrated Mass at the cathedral and ate lunch with Bishop Marco Prastaro, before flying back to the Vatican by helicopter on Sunday afternoon.
Christ became a slave “so that each of us could become a son,” Francis said at Mass Nov. 20. “He let himself be insulted and derided, so that whenever we are brought low, we will never feel alone. He let himself be stripped of his garments, so that no one would ever feel stripped of his or her rightful dignity. He ascended the cross, so that God would be present in every crucified man or woman throughout history.”
“Today, as Jesus, naked on the cross, unveils God and destroys every false image of his kingship, let us look to him and thus find the courage to look at ourselves, to follow the path of confident trust and intercession, and to make servants of ourselves, in order to reign with him,” he said.
At the end of Mass, Pope Francis addressed a few words to teenagers and young adults for the diocesan celebration of World Youth Day before praying the Angelus.
The theme of this year’s local World Youth Day, he said, is the same as the global gathering, which will take place in Lisbon, Portugal in August 2023: “Mary arose and went with haste.”
Pope Francis said he likes to ponder the Virgin Mary going “in a hurry” to visit her cousin Elizabeth, and sometimes, when he is asking for her intercession in prayer, he asks Our Lady “to hurry up and solve this problem.”
Mary’s haste, the pope said, encourages us not to waste our lives “chasing after comfort or the latest fads, but to aim for the heights.”
“Today, we need young people who are truly ‘transgressives,’ non-conformists,” he urged, “who are not slaves to their mobile phones, but who change the world like Mary, bearing Jesus to others, taking care of others, building fraternal communities with others, realizing dreams of peace.”
Hannah Brockhaus is Catholic News Agency’s senior Rome correspondent. She grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, and has a degree in English from Truman State University in Missouri.
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